Samuel Yette’s tribute to the late Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer

Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s passion for her people and her interest and understanding of how powerful the political process was in America led her and others to create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the Credential Committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1964 to be seated rather than the regular Democrats who they exclaimed were “illegally elected” based on discriminatory practices against blacks statewide. “We Will Not Accept The Compromise”, stated Mrs. Hamer.

President Johnson interrupted the nationally televised convention in order to keep Fannie Lou and her views from spreading like wildfire. All of the major networks later ran her speech in its entirety and the whole country was spellbound to hear such convictions coming from a Southerner who felt she had nothing left to fear but fear itself.

“If the Freedom Democratic Party isn’t seated today, I Question America”, Fannie told the Credentials Committee. “Is this America where we have to sleep with our phones off the hooks because we be threatened daily just cause we want to register to vote to become first class citizens”.

Three years later, as a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Ms. Hamer spoke about her experience to an audience in Washington D.C. – telling them that she was one of many black women in her area that had been a victim of a “Mississippi appendectomy” (an unwanted, unrequested and unwarranted hysterectomy given to poor and unsuspecting Black women). According to research, 60% of the black women in Sunflower County, Mississippi were subjected to postpartum sterilizations at Sunflower City Hospital without their permission.

A number of physicians who examined these women after the procedure was performed confirm that the practice of sterilizing Southern Black women through trickery or deceit was widespread.

But it does not end there. The forced sterilization of black women got its start during slavery, but has persisted in less overt forms in recent years. A 1991 experiment that implanted the now-defunct birth control device Norplant into African American teenagers in Baltimore was applauded by some observers as a way to “reduce the underclass.”

Edwin King, a Mississippi Methodist clergy, medical ethicist now retired from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and a white veteran of the Civil Rights Movement was a close associate of famed Mississippi black civil rights warrior Fannie Lou Hamer, whose pro-life views his sermon spotlighted.

“Mrs. Hamer said to me that we should see the white racism in the legalization of abortion,” King recalled visiting her after the Roe v. Wade decision. “She said that whites had always tried to control blacks, from slave breeding while slave marriage was denied to a share cropping system that depended on large families but now there were too many blacks in America so this new genocide was the answer to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.” Having not yet seriously considered the issue, King was convicted by Hamer’s strong words. “She was a new prophetic voice telling me and others that abortion is murder.”

In a 1971 speech, Hamer was quoted as saying, “The methods used to take human lives such as abortion , the pill , the ring, etc amounts to genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder ...” In another speech she said that once black women had been bought as slaves because they were considered good breeders.”Now they talk about birth control and abortion for blacks…” ( Source: This little light of mine: the life of Fannie Lou Hamer By Kay Mills, Marian Wright Edelman )

Suffering from breast cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, Fannie Lou Hamer died in Mississippi in 1977.

Below are exerts of the tribute journalist Samuel Yette wrote after her death:

” It is still a society in which an injured man must show his ability to pay before getting hospital services, but his daughter or wife can be aborted or fed birth control pills, at public expense…For these and other reasons the recent death of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer …was noted here and across the nation not only with personal sadness, but also with stern political reflection.

If nothing more Mrs. Hamer was a symbol of what was good about the 1960’s. She symbolized the will of many not merely to illuminate the society’s worst contradictions, but also to erase them.

…She knew the physical realities if rural Mississippi; she had been jailed and beaten lame for urging black citizens to vote.

She also knew the low-down deceptions of high-handed public officials: She suffered them first hand along the halls and malls of Washington.

But again, she was a gallant lady of action, and her personal integrity made possible things, that, to others, were not even thinkable.

For example when the charades of Richard Nixon included a White House Conference on hunger in 1969, Mrs. Hamer was among the hundreds of authentic grass-roots persons brought here to confir with the highly paid experts.

But the conference (whose name was changed from a conference on hunger to a conference on “Food and Nutrition”) was in reality, one great fraud against the poor.

Instead of seeking ways to feed the hungry, the back stage plan was to get the poor unwittingly to endorse a plan to eliminate from the society those who were hungry.

For example, a panel of medical experts pretended to be studying was to insure proper nourishment for babies and pregnant women. Instead it adopted-in the name of the poor at the conference- a resolution providing for:

– Birth Control devices for young girls, free, and with or without parental approval;

– Required abortions of unmarried girls discovered during the first three months of pregnancy; and

– Forced sterilization of any such girl giving birth out of wedlock a second time.

Only one black person-a nurse-was a member of that panel.

In my reportorial role, I found Mrs. Hamer for a reaction to the newly passed resolution.

She responded with shock and outrage at the deception, “I didn’t come to talk about birth control, ” she protested, ” I came here to get some food to feed poor, hungry people, Where are they carrying on that kind of talk?”

Hearing the location of the panel, she gamely pulled herself up on a cane, and made her way to the panel’s meeting room. Along the way she beckoned several black men, who followed seriously intent on doing her will.

She went straight to the front of the room and demanded to be heard.

With the power and conviction of personal tragedy, she told how she, herself, had once been sterilized under the guise of an unrelated surgical procedure. She told how such tools as their resolution in the hands of racist medical personnel would mean tragedy for the black and poor.

Finally, with several large black men at her side, Mrs. Hamer demanded that the resolution be reconsidered. It was, and voted down. But she could not stand and watch forever.

Though she saw the deception and illuminated the society’s most immoral contradictions , she, like the hope and moral vigor of he 1960’s ran out…

The author of the tribute above, Mr. Samuel Yette also suffered persecution for exposing the sinister plot to exterminate blacks with population control methods.

Samuel Yette was also one of the first and very distinguished Black journalists to work for Newsweek. After he published his book, The Choice” which exposed high level attempts of Black Genocide through birth control , abortion, and additional means , he was fired by Newsweek. Yette claims his superiors told him that the “Nixon Whitehouse” wanted him out of Washington.

Yette exposes President Nixon’s White House Conference on Food and Nutrition of December 2-4, 1969. In Mr. Yette’s words it, “was worse than a farce.” President Nixon opened the conference with 3 recommendations designed to reduce the number of hungry people! He suggested no measures for the relief of hunger in America.

1. He wanted everyone to have a guaranteed minimum income of $1,600 a year. (This is less than welfare was paying at that time.)
2. A supposed expansion of the food stamp program that would be tied into and compliment the welfare reform package in #1. (His plan would have actually reduced the amount of food stamps. Less money + less food =more hunger.)
3. Provide family planning services to at minimum 5 million women in low-income families.

This last proposal was part of a plan formulated by Dr. Charles Lowe of the National Institute of Health. The plan recommended Congress pass a law that:

1. Made birth control information and devices available to any and all girls over the age of 13 with or without parental consent.
2. Allowed mandatory abortions for unmarried girls within the 1st three months of pregnancy.
3. Mandatory sterilization for any unmarried girl giving birth out of wedlock for the 2nd time.

In that book, Yette describes how black activist, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was there for the Conference on hunger. When she heard about the birth control proposals she grabbed about a dozen young black men, walked into the room, and demanded to be heard. She spoke about ten minutes on the evil results of this plan and the conference dropped it from consideration.

Perhaps these “Conversations” with Richard Nixon will explain why he didn’t want Yette to have an shpere of influence. These are from the film: Maafa21 Black Genocide in 21st Century America and the film has more on the Yette story and more history on Black Genocide in America Today !

Today, many African Americans are facing the same elite attacks for trying to expose black genocide from abortion based on the same facts found by Samuel Yette and Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Great black Americans like Alveda King, Stephen Broden, Clenard Childress, Connie Eller, Pastor Johnny Hunter, Dr. Levon Yuille and many others.

Many of the cast of brave African Americans mentioned above speak out with boldness in the powerful documentary Maafa21.

This clip begins with an undercover call to Planned Parenthood which exposed they would take racist donations.

Fannie Lou Hamer made this mission her own and was never comfortable with more realistic goals. “If Christ were here today,” she said, ”he would be branded a radical, a militant, and would probably be branded as ‘red’. They have even painted me as Communist, although I wouldn’t know a Communist if I saw one.”

Hamer cooperated with every phase of the civil rights movement, from the conservative NAACP to the Black Panthers. But when the SNCC began evicting white members from leadership positions, Hamer mounted a powerful protest. “Jesus wasn’t talking about black people, or about white people,” she said, “he was talking about people. There’s no difference in people, for in the 17th chapter of the Book of Acts, the 26th verse, Paul says, ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.’ That means that whether we’re white, black, red, yellow, or polka dot, we’re made from the same blood.”

Hamer transcended petty politics by interpreting the freedom struggle in supernatural and cosmological terms. When the going was tough and emotions within the movement ran high, Hamer would quote Ephesians 6:11-12: “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places.</em>”

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Yette and a pleasure and honor it was. He was a true soldier for justice in the Black community. I too am an alumni of Tennessee State University and how proud I am to say I followed behind a pioneer with such reverence. Rest Mr. Yette and tell Ms. Hamer that she is one person I admire most. The two of you will forever be remembered.